skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just remember than some of the issues merchants are facing stem from PayPal's customer protection policies (I say some, not all, because I'm sure a large part of it is human error or silly policies as happens in large organizations).

The fact PayPal has merchants on a short leash should help the confidence of its users, and with all the security breaches and database leaks going on, it's good to know my CC number is not out there in multiple merchant databases.
Thanks for the write up! Makes me want to invite you for a beer, just to hear more about it.
Why CrowdEngage is trying to fuse the social video space
Text doesn't work sprint-to-sprint, either.
> It's a viable business model in the small, not when you're developing software for a huge market where a handful of customers can't bankroll future versions of the software.

That depends entirely on your apparent assumption that only high-overhead organizations can produce software for broad use. This is clearly not the case.

> The point is that when companies cannot sell the software directly, they need to rely on alternative monetization models.

It's lucky, then, that nobody has credibly established that copyright is necessary to be able to sell software directly -- or that things that are bad for the nominal customers are the only options for alternate revenue models.
My mom would totally be confused by all of those examples. My mom, like many (most?) people doesn't like to read labels. She sees the general look. That's why trade dress protection exists as distinct from trade mark protection.
That is just silly. Like saying that MS has monopoly on Windows-market. Or that YC has monopoly on HN market. A product is not a market.
While this is indeed an awesome feature to have, it doesn't by itself mean much. The total reliability of course also depends on the probability that one engine will fail, a rocket that needs all its engines may still be more reliable than one that is capable of of flying with two failed engines, but regularly has to do so.

What makes the airliner seem safe is that it can fly with a failed engine and it very rarely loses an engine.

I guess we will have to wait for some more flights till we have decent statistics on the reliability of the Falcon 9. Of course, I'm hoping that it will turn out to be an awesome rocket!
That does seem a bit high, especially when you consider that the TSX is what Honda sells as the "Accord" outside of North America. It'd be interesting to see if owners of said "Accord Euro" across the pond see similar maintenance costs.
It's not good jQuery code either.

* The naming convention is terrible. 'canvasElement' sounds like it would be the canvas element, yes? No, it's the canvas jQuery object!

* Use of hard-to-read string concatenation.

* Use of .get(0) - use [0] instead.

And some non-jQuery objections:

* Unfortunate line continuation style that is hard to maintain (What if you change the length of the canvasElement variable name? You have to re-align it!) and falls apart in a proportional font.

* Inconsistent use of single vs. double quotes. I recommend single quotes for JS strings and double quotes for HTML attributes. Do it the other way around if you prefer, but at least pick one and stick with it!

* I'm reading the code out of context, but I'm guessing that CANVAS_WIDTH and CANVAS_HEIGHT are "constants". Why are they being used directly in the code like this? Shouldn't this code be wrapped up in a function that takes those as parameters?

Ignoring that last objection for the moment, I might write the jQuery version like this:

var $canvas = $('<canvas>'), ctx = $canvas[0].getContext('2d');
$canvas
.width(CANVAS_WIDTH)
.height(CANVAS_HEIGHT)
.appendTo('body');

You're right, of course, that in this particular example jQuery has little or no advantage over direct DOM manipulation, but if they are going to offer a jQuery example, it ought to at least be a good one.

BTW the $ prefix on a variable containing a jQuery object is a very common practice in jQuery code. It's especially useful when you need both the jQuery object and the corresponding DOM element (assuming a single-element selector like '#foo'). Then you can use $ on the jQuery object and the same name without the $ for the DOM element:

var $footer = $('#footer'), footer = $footer[0];
And to add to that: one can easily misinterpret (or even just mismeasure) data, especially if it is data about a complex system.
Your bar for "sound economic footing" is set very low.
Nobel awarded for cloning and cellular reprogramming
I'm merely hypothesizing ways in which it is possible for Tesla to be in a situation where 3rd party service could legally void the warrantee. Tesla can't just void the warrantee because they say they void the warrantee.

And, for the record, I agree with you about the tire rotation.
Great domain name you have there!
I don't know if Google will ever be able to get manufacturers to make their drivers open source and offer them up to the community, but I hope they eventually manage to at least get them to bundle their proprietary drivers, and offer support for 2 years since the device's launch. In that way, it could at least become like Windows eventually, which wouldn't be a bad outcome at all.
A couple of speakers have already passed, for example Brett Van Zuiden from FilePicker.io
This reminds me that once upon a time scholars thought that art was measurable.
Is this the Bretton Woods Conference for the web as we know it?
were you born in the PRC?
Yes, I think really "avoid early returns" is an overextended special case of "avoid the nonobvious".
Copyright and the pictureless Art History textbook
Either where I went to school had an exceptional CS program, or most CS programs don't cover what my run-of-the-mill state school covered during my undergrad. About 10 years ago I came out of school at around a level 2 or 3 in almost all of the areas on this grid. I would wager pretty much any 3.5+GPA student in a decent CS program should be the same.

I didn't pursue being a professional developer so I've lost most of these things, but I remember having worked on almost all of these things (such as they were at the time). Some of these things I haven't heard mentioned since my undergrad!

Interestingly, we never studied functional languages, but did cover Prolog. This has definitely created a deficit in my thinking and consideration about certain problems/languages. If that's any indication this matrix can give insight into the abilities of people who simply haven't covered certain topics.
Looks like this is a known issue in Australia.

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1323826

It's also mentioned on Paypal.au's business page.
He also said his statement "This is never about what runs fastest...". Kernel code needs to run fast and take advantage of shortcuts.

IME, the jobs most programmers are doing don't need to try to accomplish maximum speed or need to wring a few bytes out of RAM. Certainly we don't want to be wasteful, but long-term maintainability is more important, again IME, than absolute speed or minimising memory footprint by a few (k) bytes.

Back in the bad old days when I was writing programs to run on mainframes, yeah, we did need to fight for every byte. A $5 million machine back then had less RAM and less raw CPU power than a tablet does today. We don't live in that world now.
Nowadays you can only use it for websites that accept Google AdWords.
Just concentrate on doing hard stuff.
If we are in a situation where we are unable to collect the data in the first place and you propose that theories or opinions are better, from what place did these putatively superior data or opinions come from? Because they clearly aren't coming from data.
Customer lock-in in only four easy steps!

1. Sarah gives out her new number to people she meets

2. They add Star Star SARAH to their address books

3. Two years from now Sarah wants to switch to Verizon

4. But uh-oh! Because this is an add-on it probably isn't subject to the same portability requirements as regular numbers, so now she is stuck with Sprint.
So let me get this straight, you bought an $80,000(ish) car with a full warranty, and you're mad enough about a $600/year add-on in which the company does slightly under $600 worth of work and picks your car up to do so that you write a blog post about it?
I was wondering the same thing. I was once nearly fluent in Spanish, but let it slide because I never used it (in California...). On the other hand, I know many more programming languages than I did 10 or 20 years ago. Is my brain growing?
The problem with math is that very abstract concepts are introduced to students just because it's part of a curriculum. It would be the equivalent of teaching Turing machines to accountants.

Math is full of rules of thumb. Some concepts rest on top of more fundamental ones (e.g. infinitesimal calculus), but often this deeper reasoning is glossed over or ignored completely.

To really learn math is hard. To pass exams though, all you need to do is memorize rules. Not everybody is comfortable with that, some people need more concrete examples, or a better understanding of the big picture, to really grasp a subject.
This isn't really solving a problem. Phone numbers are already unique, so why replace with another unique based system that has a one to one correspondence?

I'd really like to see something like DNS. You can register a "phone number" or "phone name", upon calling something, it sends a lookup to your phone provider, which then provides a lookup to whatever server houses the data for said name which resolves a unique name or series of characters (not limited to alphanumeric increasing combinations) that responds with data that the phone can digest and create an active connection. Imagine being in control of your own data, who can call you, what sort of data a subscriber can obtain when calling you, etc. Sort of an app.net for your own contact info.
> The company said the card is an “alternative to debit and checking accounts” and will be available next week online or in more than 4,000 Walmart stores.

This proves that cash is dead. The product is in most respects indistinguishable from cash, with the difference that it can only be spent in one place.

Now the fun part:

> Walmart and American Express announced Monday morning that they would make available a reloadable prepaid card for consumers tired of banking fees.

Claim: prevents banking fees.

> There is no fee to set up the card online at Bluebird.com but there is a $5 fee for an account set up kit at Walmart stores...

Contradiction: involves a banking fee.

I have just one question -- if someone steals your card, can they use it? If so, then it really is indistinguishable from cash. What's wrong with cash?
Itself under NDA...
Only one of those guys is 50+. Carmack is only 42. You are talking about exceptional programmers, with a high impact on their fields. If you want to emulate them, you'll end up quitting at 50, realizing you aren't ever going to reach their level. Most people don't. You won't be a rockstar, you'll be lucky to be better than average. Set goals for yourself and meet them. If you don't have any goals, then come up with some good ones.
Hacker League adds resumes to hacker profiles
Here's an answer from YC partner Gary Tan:

"If you ever want to take outside investment, you'll want to be a Delaware C corp. It's just standard and investors know how to deal with it. Even Facebook started as something else, but had to reincorporate.

It's not too difficult to fix, but might as well the avoid the problem in the first place." [1]

[1] http://www.quora.com/Y-Combinator/Why-does-Y-Combinator-reco...
Lawmakers to U.S. companies: Don't buy Huawei, ZTE
That's a very acceptable fee for such a high-tech piece of engineering. Most warrantied commercial equipment has mandatory service contract requirements, so it's no surprise that we're seeing that in the consumer arena as well.
Ask HN: As a marketer, how can I determine the quality/ability of programmers?
Significantly less paperwork for one. You can form an LLC with a single sheet of paper in some states. No separate tax forms to file. Any losses pass down to the members, which is especially beneficial when you are starting since lots of startups(in fact any new business) will probably have losses. I am not an accountant, but I think you can also offset income from previous years if your losses exceed your total income.

Edit: I'm not too familiar with the S-corp election for C corps, so most likely most of the pass-through benefits apply there as well.
Congressional Panel Warns ZTE and Huawei are a Security Threat to the U.S.
Perhaps we just consult different documentation as time goes on... RTFM is most often directed at people who have an easy answer waiting for them in the documentation, but lazily asked a newsgroup/list/etc. to solve their problems instead as a first step.
Ransomware malware targeting Skype users
Wisdom I won't want to forget
You were fortunate that Paypal were 'kind' enough to let you have the money in your account before closing it, I wouldn't have expected that! I guess that says something about their reputation.
This really isn't that complicated. Electric cars use a combination of regenerative braking (using the generator to convert kinetic energy; forward velocity, into electric energy) and using the disc brakes when regenerative braking doesn't slow you down fast enough. This results in much less wear on the brake pads and callipers.
Less than 1000 users thus far. Great time to reserve your name.
He lied (or at the very least was not entirely truthful) during jury selection. Samsung can't account for that.
Good Addictions
Find your tribe
This phenomenon sounds like a combination of a negative placebo effect and learned helplessness.
CloudSpring | SQL or NOSQL: Google App Engine - Part 1CloudSpring
Technology moving from the military to the private sector is rarely a free market activity. It's much more common for the Pentagon to have bankrolled the upfront R&D costs of a defense contractor, who first provides it to the military and then transitions it to commercial use.
It depends, but in general there is a time limit on classification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification#United_States explains it pretty well, and http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526 is the executive order that governs the classification system used by the US Government.
Your go-to source argues that the point of copyright and patent monopolies is actually to incentivize innovation, which conflicts with your own claim that the purpose of copyright and patent monopolies is not to incentivize innovation:

> > Intellectual property rights are an exception to that norm, and they are granted only when – and only to the extent that – they are necessary to encourage invention.

Meanwhile, you have not offered an alternative justification for copyright monoplies, as far as I've noticed.

edit: It's also notable that a major purpose of Lemley's paper is to debunk the notion that there is any meaningful "free rider problem" in the world of patentable and copyrightable, but you claim a "free rider problem" is a major incentive to keep copyright and patent law.
Escape From Message Hell | Nir and Far
On the contrary, it is useful to have a comprehensive, substantive measure of technical skills. Having one does not preclude additional assessments, as you assume. I have been continually disappointed with the lack of extensiveness in technical interviews, as a candidate, but also as an interviewer when reviewing other interviewer assessments of potential candidates. I have yet to meet a programmer who doesn't believe they are very good at what they do and I believe this problem is due in large part to the shoot-from-the-hip approach that the industry takes at the interview stage.
They do. The rules for classification of documents come from Executive Order 13526: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526#Part_1

The upshot is that when a classified document is created, it comes with a declassification date. They can be 10 to 25 years in the future. There are also specific exemptions that come with 50 or even 75 year timers. After that it's automatically declassified unless a review determines that it's still sensitive.

So you can generally expect to see declassified documents on a 50-, 25-, and 10-year delay.

If you're worried about information being classified to prevent embarrassment, though, that's illegal:

Sec 1.7

(a) In no case shall information be classified,
continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to
be declassified in order to:

(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency,
or administrative error;

(2) prevent embarrassment to a person,
organization, or agency;

(3) restrain competition; or

(4) prevent or delay the release of
information that does not require protection in
the interest of the national security.

While that doesn't make it impossible that it happens, it does mean anyone with access to the information has a duty to report that sort of fraud to legal authorities if they encounter it.
Smartphones – The Next Great Medical Frontier?
London cab drivers also show an increase when acquiring 'the knowledge'.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=london-taxi...
I think each side gets only a limited number chances to disqualify potential jurors, so Samsung might have run out of objections.
I think if making sure students felt safe was all that was necessary, the self-esteem movement of the '90s wouldn't be so harshly derided today. A possible alternative to making everyone felt non-competitive is to make the participants certain that the competition is egalitarian and fair, that everyone had equal opportunity to do well in it.
>They have really focused an inordinate amount of attention on the jury, and when your argument starts to look at the people instead of their decision, you're not starting down a good road.

Except the problem here is that the decision was seemingly directly influenced by the people. The whole point of jury selection is to keep this kind of thing from happening. Samsung screwed up badly.
In the preview of the text version, the code formatting looks good. In the preview for the Kindle version, the code formatting looks awful.

This is the number one problem I look for in programming ebooks.
This is one of those cases where a story fits very cleanly into a pre-existing narrative. It's a useful exercise in those cases to try to stretch your mind and figure out what parts might be being left out.

No, no knowledge of the incident beyond the article, but Sweden is hardly a Harrison Bergeron society.
Tesla is not Ford. The numbers are completely different which necessitates a subscription model or higher prices in general. Early adopters shouldn't be surprised when their toys costs more, it's always been that way.
It depends on the threat. If you're worried about someone writing a custom script to attack your site, you want a hard captcha. If you're worried about random form-filling bot spammers, you want to be unique.

I wrote a plugin for wordpress years ago that simply asked you to copy a number into a box. If you had JavaScript, it would even do it for you and hide it so most users never even knew it was there. It filtered out nearly every single piece of spam. This would have been mid-2000s though, might be different now.
I own a blog network and the most common reason touted to me for building an app is to gain access to the fancy ad units available on apps.
This argument only makes sense if you're trying to say that all Android phones violate the iPhone trade dress. Since they clearly don't, and the effect you posit exists (which I don't argue), you're simply wrong by construction, no?
You didn't refute one fact. You only corrected his wording and I'd actually say that the word "stole" is correct given the fact that all of this was done in secret. See definition #4 here http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/steal?s=t

"FYI: Those of us that worked on "fun stuff" used to get a kick out of the tin foil crowd."

That sounds kind of smug. Do you have the highest possible security clearance? If not, then whatever you think you know is probably hampering your perception.
Twitter Bootstrap 2.1.2 Preview
Goto's are bad because they allows you to jump to anywhere in the code, regardless of structure, which undermines all assumptions you can make about control flow.

Knowing where you are jumping doesn't help you to make assumptions about the control flow.

Goto's are bad because they allows you to jump. The jump in itself is the problem because it breaks the instruction flow arbitrarily - without explicitly expressing the boolean condition for it. Early exits are of the same kind: they don't express explicitly the boolean condition of the jump. We know where we are jumping. Not why. With time, the boolean equation of the code which determines the instruction flow is unmaintainable. And then you end up not understand where your flow is going through, not because you don't know where a jump is going, but because you have lost why.

Most gotos, early returns, breaks and continues (C speaking) are considered to be bad habits for this reason.

return only goal is to return values to the function caller. Not to jump.

Function calls jump back to whatever call them so it's like there has been no jump at all in terms of instruction flow - you basically can continue to read the code assuming some code has been executed behind the function name.
Dream. Fit. Passion.
I'm not familiar with the specifics of Falcon9 redundancy. But in theory, losing many engines can be completely recoverable, because all 9 engines share a single fuel tank.

Outside of atmosphere, a rocket's final speed and orbit depend on three factors: the mass of the payload, the mass of the fuel, and the inherent engine design efficiency. Notably, it does not depend on thrust. Burning one engine for 9 seconds results in a speed boost equal to burning 9 engines for 1 second.

Even if an engine fails and another one is set to reduced thrust, the fuel is still there, and can be burned by remaining engines.

Of course, this is a huge simplification, and loss of thrust while still in atmosphere or near the ground might be a problem.
What a great quote. I wonder where it came from.
VLMC: We are looking for contributors
This is the stupidest thing I've seen on this topic. Are we trying to eliminate good candidates? Because that's what this will help with.

If programmers spent half the time they spent evaluating others on being better programmers we wouldn't have any problems.
Hacker Attack Results in Thousands of Player and NPC 'Deaths' in WoW
Taiwan's HTC third-quarter net falls 79 percent, lags forecasts
He was truthful about the patents, which I think are a bigger flag than the entire Seagate thing.
It may be a "hobby" but I've been doing it for 12 years, made money off of it, and would argue that I probably know more (theoretical and practical) than your average bachelor's grad in CS.

And I don't know where this "random info on the internet" came from. My knowledge comes from algorithm textbooks or papers from university websites.

Why the vitriol?
Nobel Prize for medicine awarded to Gurdon, Yamanaka for stem cell discoveries
Maybe it's just me, but I find it very cool that people actually looked at alternative design of aircraft and stuff like Project Orion. Yes, it's a waste of money. But at least it's a fairly creative waste of money that could have produced some interesting technologies.
Preprocess That: Comparing CSS Preprocessors vs CSSEdit
This is great, although I wish it would have started few years earlier.